Come now.

Iran started this in 1979, when it took 52 Americans hostage.

Over the years it financed terror across the Middle East and Europe.

Its goal was explicit: To bring an end to the West: pluralism, democracy, all that. /1

https://twitter.com/TVietor08/status/1936587371480592555

In 2015, the Obama Administration, including @TVietor08, cut a deal with Iran premised on the assumption that Iran could be incentivized not to build a nuclear arsenal. If you ignored the previous three-and-a-half decades, it kind of made sense. /2

Note that this guy works for a media company mostly funded by the Qatari regime, which runs on the blood, sweat and tears of what are basically indentured servants from across the Middle East and south Asia. /1

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1930721246746202272

This is the same regime that until recently provided safe haven to the Hamas high command, who lived in five-star hotels while the people they were supposedly fighting for were dying in Gaza. /2

Oswald. It's always been Oswald.

This used to be easier for Americans to believe because there was a widespread faith in the institutions.

Also: We used to be less stupid, less prone to mythical thinking, not so easily coopted by hucksters and conspiracy theorists.

https://twitter.com/joerogan/status/1902152285003690296

The facts of the case have not changed.

We have changed.

The conspiracy theorists and their many adherents believe they're just asking questions.

Really, they are betraying a profound alienation and ignorance, a malleability, a desire to believe that they lack agency.

This is a terrible mistake that endangers U.S. interests by encouraging Russian expansionism in the former Soviet space, and signals to Iran and China that we are not serious about defending the principles of freedom and democracy and self-determination.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1889722028120285217

The United States should not be sidestepping Ukraine. We should be arming it with advanced weapons to force Russia to retreat and discourage it from ever invading one of its neighbors again.

The thesis of The West Wing was that civic-minded, Ivy-educated liberals, given the chance, would do a brilliant job of running the world.

The problem is when the people in charge are not civic-minded and only superficially intelligent, outfitted with the correct lingo.../1

https://twitter.com/LemonLymancom/status/1877011205392404594

the correct opinions, the correct aesthetic. There is a tendency, among many on the left and center-left, to think these people are the people they claim to be, but they're not. They're simulacra. /2

What's happening in Georgia is a reminder of how wrong President-elect Trump, Tulsi Gabbard and, more broadly, the new right is w/r/t Russia. /1

https://twitter.com/mari_nikuradze/status/1871924419913994446

The widely held view in the America First camp is that the United States cornered Russia into invading Ukraine. That's Kremlin propaganda, and the demonstrators in Tbilisi are a reminder of as much. /2

Rogan has helped expand the discourse, making room for ideas and points of view that run afoul of the sclerotic and insular legacy media, but there's absolutely nothing legendary about this. /1

https://twitter.com/IanJaeger29/status/1862503618936463827

This seems like the kind of move that's meant to fire up an increasingly maga-esque audience, which doesn't want to consider the possibility that Zelensky is not, in fact, a con artist or villain siphoning U.S. tax dollars at the expense of global stability. /2

Last year I met the mother of Mark Swidan, an American wrongly imprisoned in China -- 12 years ago.

"It’s just me and my best friend (mom) left!" he once wrote in a letter his mother could barely bring herself to read.

Tonight, Mark Swidan comes home.

thefp.com/p/a-prisoner-o… For years, Swidan languished in prison. His fiancé left him. His body started to break down. His mother grew older, sicker, more desperate.

There is a blindness on the new right w/r/t Russia, which they insist on viewing sympathetically. That is their starting point, and it's divorced from much, if any, knowledge of history or culture. It leads to the most absurd cul de sac, in which victim becomes villain. /1

https://twitter.com/DrewPavlou/status/1860416404153131189

The most important thing to bear in mind about the Russian state is that it is basically a criminal enterprise. It has been that way since at least Ivan, who ruled Russia in the mid-16th century and, more than anyone else, shaped its political culture more. /2

Several friends have asked whether the Democrats’ warm reception of the parents of a Jewish hostage being held in Gaza suggests that claims of left-wing antisemitism are overblown. I don’t think so. /1 I think that what happened last night in the United Center was touching and powerful, and it indicates that most Americans, irrespective of their political bent, can empathize with a mother and father doing everything in their power to bring their son home — alive. /2